The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/astronomers-interstellar-visitor-1.4410477 <comment><USER2> I think it's a shame that this story hasn't gotten more attention.

True, it doesn't tell us as much about the nature of the universe as the discovery of the Higgs boson, and it doesn't represent a major advance in engineering like gravitational wave detection. But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won't come until we send a probe to Proxima Centauri.

To me, the thought of an asteroid being hurled out of the solar system that created it, then traveling through the cold void for millions or possibly billions of years, and then whipping around the sun (a mere 0.25 AU distant) is just the most incredible thing. The whole world should be having parties in its honor, to wish it well as it leaves us behind. (Instead of just fighting each other over nothing, as we usually do.)

This is an amazing time to be alive.

<comment><USER3> _But it is the only chance we have ever had to directly view a largeish piece of another solar system, just millions of miles away. The next time probably won 't come until we send a probe to Proxima Centauri._

While this is the only one we've seen so far, the current belief is that similar objects might actually quite common. A parallel newspaper article in the Guardian [1] cites a paper out of UCLA [2], and works through the math:

      The other group of astronomers, led by David Jewitt,
      University of California Los Angeles, estimated how
      many other interstellar visitors like it there might
      be in our solar system.

      Surprisingly, they calculate that another 10,000 could
      be closer to the Sun than the eighth planet, Neptune,
      which lies 30 times further from the Sun than the Earth.
      Yet these are currently undetected.

      Each of these interstellar interlopers would be just
      passing through. They are travelling too fast to be
      captured by the gravity of the Sun. Yet it still takes
      them about a decade to cross our solar system and
      disappear back into interstellar space.

      If this estimate is correct, then roughly 1,000 enter
      and another 1,000 leave every year – which means that
      roughly three arrive and three leave every day.

So now that we now to look for them, it may be possible that we'll be able to find others, at least before the probe reports back from Proxima Centauri.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the- universe/2017...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the- universe/2017/nov/20/interstellar-object-confirmed-to-be-from-another-solar- system)

[2] [http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jewitt/papers/2017/JLR17.pdf](http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jewitt/papers/2017/JLR17.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Would it still be travelling too fast to be captured if it hit the sun directly?

<comment><USER5> Is something technically captured by a gravity well if it just happens to hit the object at the center? I assume not.

<comment><USER6> At the very least, I'd say that... after collision, assuming complete coalescence into the object, they will share identical orbital parameters

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recommend anyone interested read the paper which is available as a preprint from Nature (for the moment): goo.gl/cSsHoj (link shortened due to having an embedded access token).

Some tantalizing points from the paper:

\- They constrained the aspect ratio in two dimensions to be 10:1:C, but the third dimension is unconstrained. Depending on which axis the object is rotating around, C could either be 1, or 20. Either of these would be an essentially unique object within the solar system. This is a really weird shape.

\- If the object is rotating around its short axis, it must have internal tensile strength (ie, it's a solid object, not just a pile of dust/gravel accreted by gravity). Lower bound on the required tensile strength is 3 Pascal (very little).

\- There is essentially no dust/ice on the object - less than 1 kg within 2.5". So it's not a comet, and would have to be asteroidal. This conflicts with our current understanding of what objects would be in interstellar space. Current models have almost all objects ejected from our system being icy comets. This object would be analogous to a Manx comet, ie a rocky asteroid in a highly elliptical long period orbit.

\- The shape of the observed light curve deviates from the best-fit triaxial ellipsoid in a way that suggests large flat or concave sections. It would take unrealistically large albedo variations to produce the same deviation without flat/concave sections.

And of course, of all the planets in the solar system, it made its closest approach to Earth, an astronomical "near miss" at just 0.16 AU :)

<comment><USER8> \- strange aspect ratio

\- tensile strength (it should be cartwheeling, there is a physics theorem which means everything tends to this configuration)

\- large flat or concave sections.

\- others are reporting it's mostly metallic.

I'll say it: did anyone consider an alien spaceship? The paper seems to deduce "asteroidal" by ruling out other things, rather than by a positive measurement of rock spectra, unless I've misread it.

<comment><USER9> Co-author here. We obtained spectroscopic measurements of 'Oumuamua, and its surface closely matches D-type asteroids and comet nuclei, which are dark, reddish and organic-rich.

<comment><USER10> Of course an asteroid, hollowed out somewhat, makes for a good spaceship. Especially if you're trying to be covert.

Perhaps someone has discovered warp drives (is gravitational wave detection the first step) and the Federation have sent a ship to observe us.

<comment><USER11> If you wanted to disguise a probe, it seems the ideal form would be a black body, not to disguise it as an asteroid, I would guess. Unless they're playing mind games.

Anyways, given all the EM radiation we're tossing out into the void, some species' probe out there is going to pick up our existence sooner or later.

And at ~395 earth-moon distances it's difficult to imagine how effective a 400-meter object, disguised as an asteroid, would be at seeing much detail on earth.

But it is tantalizing and fun to imagine--the appearance of a gravity boost... Flat surfaces... Near to earth... Lack of any ice or outgasing, a solid object, many characteristics not seen in other known-asteroids, rotating on its long axis... :)

<comment><USER12> > And at ~395 earth-moon distances it's difficult to imagine how effective a > 400-meter object, disguised as an asteroid, would be at seeing much detail > on earth.

Ah, but it's a carrier for the small, stealthy probes!

<comment><USER13> And waterbears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What a pity they did not call it Rama ;-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama)

<comment><USER15> Would be interesting if it changed course.

<comment><USER16> "interesting" is an understatement. We'd instantly have a new space/weapon race.

<comment><USER17> The premise of Saturn Run

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If there're a lot of these objects entering and leaving solar system every year, and suppose some day in the near future we can keep track of them all, can we use them for us to send out larger probes? We see a rock coming near us, and send out a probe to its path. And before the collision the probe create a buffer object at the rear end so that it wouldn't be totally destroyed. After that the probe can free ride for a while at a high speed and re-ignite when it decides to go a separate path.

<comment><USER19> Not sure about a buffer object, but a tether on a reel might work.

You harpoon the object, then let it pull the probe, giving lots of slack according to the engineering tolerances of the harpoon in the object (don't want it to come loose), the tether (don't want it to snap), the reel (don't want it to spin apart or get stuck or any one of a number of things), and the probe (don't want it damaged under extreme acceleration).

With enough tether and a low-enough-friction reel with magnetic bearings (think of the ungodly RPMs), you can accelerate the probe at almost any speed you'd like, within reason, although it would be best to accelerate as quickly as possible without risking. And remember that you only need to get the whole harpoon/tether/reel (HTR, or HiTchhikeR; you saw it here first) mechanism in range of the object as it passes by, so it can be bulkier than you would put on a probe moving under its own power. Or you could start off as usual, maybe with a gravity assist, which would allow for a less sophisticated HTR.

Then if you want to be clever, you can turn all those RPMs into stored energy. But that might not be worth the trouble.

<comment><USER11> Might be possible, but the tensile strength required may be beyond our material science capabilities.

A harpoon impacting an object going 26km/s would experience something like 12,000gs even if you gave it a 1km-long buffer.

So your harpoon would have to be rocket-assisted. The problem now is how long does your need to be? The tensile strength to carry the weight of the tether itself may make this impossible.

<comment><USER19> > Might be possible, but ... may be beyond our material science capabilities.

Certainly, for now and a while to come.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps some ultra-lightweight probe using some sophisticated ultra-strong elastic tethers may be a way to accelerate an object at an orders of magnitude greater speed using asteroids as counter-weights. Probably nothing strong- enough, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very interesting! So all known "stuff floating around in our solarsystem" like Hale-Bopp et al have been deemed originating from here? Or have that conclusion just been taken for granted?

Edit:

Looked at the paper and saw this in the abstract:

>None of the approximately 750,000 known asteroids and comets is thought to have originated outside our Solar System, but formation models suggest that orbital migration of the giant planets ejected a large fraction of the original planetesimals into interstellar space1.

Very interesting that this has been the thought of affairs for objects in our solar system. I have never contemplated it and just assumed we must have been visited before by such objects.

<comment><USER21> It's apparently to do with the orbit - they identified this as extrasolar purely by the fact its orbit would be extremely unlikely to have arisen from our solar system's protoplanetary disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Found to be among the most elongated deep space objects known: [http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-42053634](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42053634)

Can't help but think of the Chindi!

</comment><comment><USER23> Elongated is not a very natural shape for rocks in space. It is going to get real interesting if this thing starts slowing down.

<comment><USER24> Already passed the Sun.

<comment><USER25> Which means it is in fact slowing down as it climbs out of the Sun's gravity well. It's just not the kind of slowing down that parent was hoping for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought "deep space" was intergalactic space, the really big void. But if the object came from within the Milky Way itself, it came from a rather busy place -- speaking in Universe terms.

</comment><comment><USER27> How close to earth did it pass ? A possible extinction event just flew bye and there where nothing we could do about. Btw, that looks like a gravity assist/slingshot ...

<comment><USER7> 0.16 AU, according to the paper.

<comment> semi-extrinsic For comparison, the Earth's radius is 0.00004 AU. This is like a mosquito passing your car at a closest distance of 2 miles.

<comment><USER11> ~395 earth-moon distances away and 1/20th the size of the object that killed the dinosaurs

<comment><USER16> 1/20th the size, but 4 time the speed. Assuming the density of the 2 objects were the same, and because energy is proportional to the square of speed, it would cary a similar amount of energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What was its speed at closest sun approach? Because the speed of objects in our solar system are all very low compared to the speed of the nearest solar system compared to our sun, I imagine this could also be the fastest object ever to be obversed in our solar system.

<comment><USER29> Its speed peaked at 87.71 km/s at perihelion.

<comment><USER30> It looks like there was a sungrazer comet an order of magnitude faster than that at 600 km/s (2.16e6/3600), so this was not the fastest solar system object ever.

[https://futurism.com/the-sun-just-killed-the-fastest- moving-...](https://futurism.com/the-sun-just-killed-the-fastest-moving- object-in-the-solar-system/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Forget about going to Mars, making a probe riding these things will be much more interesting.

<comment><USER32> I just recently read (well, listened to) Pushing Ice ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Ice)) which is along these lines. Fantastic story for anyone that likes hard sci fi, it starts off with a moon of saturn suddenly breaking out of orbit and the crew being sent on an intercept mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The first thought looking at the picture -- it could be interstellar probe created by some alien race. Rotation and metal body -- something to think about. This reminds me "The Dark Forest Theory" described in the fantastic trilogy "The Three-Body Problem" by Cixin Liu [1] -- Chinese Isaac Asimov. Really great read in case you didn't read it yet.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin- Liu/dp/07653...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin- Liu/dp/0765382032/)

</comment><comment><USER34> is it looking for whales?

</comment><comment><USER35> Could we ever use a net to stick a probe to one and get a free trip out of the solar system?

<comment><USER36> I think that because it is moving so fast the net would have to be accelerated significantly so that it wouldn't just tear through the net.

Plus there's the issue of actually getting into position in time to setup all the maneuvers required to match the speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It was a test. If we had blown it out of the sky, then the aliens would know we are armed and dangerous, and they better stay away.

But we didn't do that, and that means, well, let's just say things are going to get rather interesting.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't get the excitement. I thought it's common that stones of different sizes enter our solar system take a loop and exit again. That's exactly what this tourist plans on doing, or not? What's different?

<comment><USER22> Yes but this is the first _observed_ instance of a stone that seems to come from outside the solar system and outside the Oort Cloud even, so basically from interstellar space. And its shape and albedo or unusual too, seemingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If all those sci-fi movies have thought me anything, that's a spacecraft masquerading as a rock. You can't fool all of us aliens!!!

</comment><comment><USER40> Did anyone check if it is rotating and at the right rpm to produce planetary gravity inside?

</comment><comment><USER41> It could very well be vampires[0]. So please leave it alone.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Vampires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Vampires)

</comment><comment><USER42> Now, what if it turns out to be an alien ship?

</comment><comment><USER43> Wish Carl Sagan were still alive.

</comment><comment><USER44> i'm surprised there aren't more things entering our solar system from deep space considering how large the universe is

</comment><comment><USER45> Famous last words?

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't think we earthlings are constantly watching every corner of our solar system.

</comment><comment><USER47> "This artist's concept shows [...]"

F __you artists concept. Drawing fantasy pictures in news messages is not ok.

\+ I'm no grammar guy, nor a native speaker, but "artists's" is wrong, isn't it?

<comment><USER48> Artist's is fine ("artist his"), artists's would be artists'. Depends on how many people worked on the art piece :)

<comment><USER49> For the record, the expansion "... his" is considered "folk etymology": a reanalysis from the Early Modern English period in the language's history. Notice for example how it doesn't make sense for feminine words: "Mary's house".

In fact, the possessive "'s" is a leftover from Old English, where the inflectional suffix "es" marked the genitive case.

<comment><USER48> Yeah it's a mnemonic device, nonetheless quite useful to explain the rule.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Silicon 60: a who's who of London's tech startup scene - <AUTHOR> http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/the-silicon-60-a-whos-who-of-londons-tech-startup-scene-9258737.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I think this article is silly.

I've submitted this story because I think it's a symptom of how the tech boom in London could face serious cultural issues. British society has an elitism that means they need to make these kind of hierarchies and I wonder if it won't eventually prevent new start ups from getting the attention that they need without the 'blessing' of one of these people?

But maybe it works like this in the 'Valley' as well?

<comment><USER2> Agree to an extent however its not a bad sample of the main players. Every network has its own hierarchies and patronage... tech is no different.

The main negative for me is it doesn't give any feedback on the health of the London tech scene... just the deification of founders (which if you want to talk about elitism has quite a fair few rich kids spending daddy's money!) so the inevitable focus on board level, VCs and the schmoozers.

It would have been better to see more from those who've made it and those who are just starting out for commentary on their difficulties, challenges and feedback to the wider community and/or govt.

ps - got to love the picture in front of a 'smug' fridge

[http://www.appliancecity.co.uk/news/wp- content/uploads/2011/...](http://www.appliancecity.co.uk/news/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/smug-smeg-fridge.png)</comment></comment>


How Correlated Are Silicon Valley Housing Prices and Venture Activity? - <AUTHOR> https://mattermark.com/editorial/2016/11/vc-activity-just-might-predict-silicon-valley-housing-prices/ <comment><USER2> Page not found.</comment>


An updated review of Jon Erickson's Hacking: The Art of Exploitation - <AUTHOR> http://securitybookreviews.eu/articles/hacking-the-art-of-exploitation-review/#.UXUqDSttWAA

<comment><AUTHOR> This was an interesting book to review as I read the first edition ages ago, bought the second edition and never bothered reading it. With the Shellcoder's Handbook 2nd Edition this really is pretty much everything you needed in 2008 to get started, but it's amazing how much things have moved on.

It's still worth a look as a book, but obviously there's a lot more to do afterwards now than there was then.</comment>


An improvised Lego device helped scientists conduct tests at CERN - <AUTHOR> https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/using-lego-study-building-blocks-universe <comment><USER2> >"Soon, my colleagues started to complement the experiment by adding some LEGO trees on top of the structure," recounts Michael. "I had to write a message asking them not to do so."

Proving yet again, that given ANYTHING that is efficient engineers will eventually try to improve it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This kinda reminds me how Otto Wichtrle created the first contact lense on a machine build from the Merkur construction set (known as Mechano in the West):

[https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Merkur_based_apparatu...](https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Merkur_based_apparatus_for_centrifugal_casting_of_contact_lenses_by_wichterle.jpg)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/soft-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/soft- contact-lenses-were-created-with-a-toy-construction-set/381070/)

Even saw the actual mashine on an exhibition once - cleverly done & powered by a bicycle dynamo. :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> This gives snother example where the old-generation Lego Technics bricks shine. Besides their circular holes at the side, these still connect at their top and their bottom side with regular Lego studs.

I wish these bricks have a comeback. Why did Lego go this way? I assume it was too complicated to use for some as it allows for a two dimensional connection. Although on the other hand, this actually increases creativity in my opinion, because you could do more with a small assortment of pieces. However, this of course hinders sales of new sets, which might be a reason why Lego had a crisis around y2k.

<comment><USER5> The traditional bricks are difficult to stack and vertically to connect at the same time. Stone, two plates, Stone and then the holes on the vertical axis fit again. The modern beams are 1x1x1. Much better structure for model building.

<comment><USER6> 'Stone'? You mean 'brick'.

<comment><USER7> In some languages Lego pieces are "stones".

<comment><USER5> Yepp. That is my case :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to use legos for air blown temperature tests of electronics. You just need to keep most of the air in, fit a few shapes of DUTs (hard drives, ethernet transceivers, etc) and not melt at 100C. Some vendors do not like the idea of legos used in a test setup. Some vendors don't know a good solution when they see it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Legos are a magnificent piece of engineering. They really care about the product and they work within extremely rigourous tolerances. Their practical utility is underrated.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3oiy9eekzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3oiy9eekzk)

<comment><USER10> I admit this is nitpicky, that language is naturally evolving and corporations cannot make rules about how English should be spoken but "Legos" isn't strictly correct. The correct term, per The LEGO Group should be "LEGO bricks". At one point they had this written on their website:

"Please always refer to our products as "LEGO bricks or toys" and not "LEGOS." By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud, and that stands for quality the world over"

Also, though "Legos" is somewhat common in North America, it's less common in the rest of the English-speaking world.

<comment><USER6> Lego's argument always struck me as absurd. Imagine Ford doing the same thing: "Please refer to our vehicles as 'Ford vehicles' or 'cars', and not 'Fords'. By doing so..."

<comment><USER11> I think the temptation to start a car company that markets "Ford" cars is probably less than the temptation to put on your box of bricks that they are compatible with Lego bricks.

If the company doesn't take reasonable actions to protect the mark, they lose control of it.

<comment><USER12> What does that have to do with how people call actual LEGO bricks?

<comment><USER11> I figured [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276586) made the context clear enough.

Ford doesn't worry about losing their brand. Lego does. So Ford regularly uses the brand as a noun itself, Lego Group asks people to not do that.

<comment><USER12> The only risk I can see is becoming a generic term for "construction bricks". I don't see how me calling my genuine Lego bricks Legos contribute to that.

<comment><USER11> It's how trademark law is written, use as a noun indicates it is becoming a generic term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also:

[https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/legos-absolute-zero- science](https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/legos-absolute-zero-science)

[https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/01/18/lego-in- the-l...](https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/01/18/lego-in-the-lab/)

[https://news.utexas.edu/2018/06/27/new-nerve-gas-detector- bu...](https://news.utexas.edu/2018/06/27/new-nerve-gas-detector-built-with- legos-and-a-smartphone/)

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/320416v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/320416v1)

[https://twitter.com/whippletom/status/1011995003923681280?la...](https://twitter.com/whippletom/status/1011995003923681280?lang=en)

[https://twitter.com/samburgroup/status/1012165655036981248](https://twitter.com/samburgroup/status/1012165655036981248)

[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scientists-use-lego-to- co...](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scientists-use-lego-to-come-up-with- simple-answer-to-an-expensive-problem-nhm2qc7pt)

[https://mrc.ukri.org/news/blog/lego-powered-biomedical- resea...](https://mrc.ukri.org/news/blog/lego-powered-biomedical-research/)

Probably lots more out there too!

</comment><comment><USER14> There is a very cute Lego version of the LHC in the lobby of the building that houses the LHC. Lego should actually bring it to market.

</comment><comment><USER15> The one case where the kragle is necessary.

<comment><USER16> Not the Kragl!!</comment></comment>


Building a company brick-by-brick - <AUTHOR> https://bloo.ie/blog/building-a-company-brick-by-brick/

<comment><USER2> "I have found very little written about the journey to $10k and the struggles it brings".

I agree.

First mention of customers: "We were seeing some interest and already had some nice early sign-ups (approximately 250 sites)".

What about the story of those first 250 customers then? Because I have found very little written about the journey to the first 250 customers and the struggles it brings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those customers were for the old product. There is not really much point in going into how we got them as the product changed. I will be going through how we got our first 100 customers after the 4 post in this series! If you want to subscribe to the blog you can get the posts as they go live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing your journey! I really like your product and might try it for clients (saas companies) :-)

I was curious how come your product has been developed for so long and then I read your previous articles and how you pivoted from chatroulette-like conversations to better for online chat conversations for companies.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. Feel free to get in touch with me directly re. using the product for clients. More than happy to help with anything like that. Yes our journey has been a longish one but we have a great team and supportive investors who have helped us a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great read, I think a lot of startup blogs skip the ...start bit and jump to "here's how we scaled!"

Glad to see an Irish company talking about this stuff too (though I wasn't sure if ye were Irish until I read that Darragh was your first hire :P). Good luck to ye!

<comment><AUTHOR> Irish founders... english company. Shhhhh

Myself and my co founder are from Kildare and Wicklow respectively.

<comment><USER4> I was wondering why I hadn't seen ye about :P Irish people going abroad to start companies seems to work well, good luck :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing and highlighting the runway point. Follow-on funding shouldn't be an after thought once sh*t hits the fan. It should be baked into forecasts/plans from the get-go, if it's something that will be needed either for growth, or as a margin of safety.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is 100% correct. It was a hard lesson to learn but we are now pretty savvy to the process. However I think that it is very hard to plan for a buffer margin. There are very few business plans that I have seen that plan for buffer margins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can't seem to be able to subscribe to the blog. At least, Bazqux gives

      ProtocolError "error:14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 alert handshake failure"

</comment><comment><USER7> Good read. Thanks for writing this. Provided just the reminder I needed that hustling isn't easy but often necessary for the survival of a company. Good luck with the slight pivot :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Solid advice - good write up

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Glad you liked it.</comment></comment>


How many startups will Facebook Gifts kill? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/08/how-many-startups-will-facebook-gifts-kill/ <comment><USER3> The solution: Stop playing startup in the walled garden. You're going to get boned every single time.

I don't even understand the logic here. Companies exist to make money. Companies who own the platform will notice you if you are profitable, pull the rug out from under you, and clone your business model so that they are more profitable.

It's not a bad thing. It's not evil. It's not even bad for the users - <USER2> company can probably offer a level of service that you can't because they have the keys to the kingdom.</comment>


Wil Schroter's Go BIG or Go Home -- free full pdf download - <AUTHOR> http://www.asiaing.com/go-big-or-go-home-the-playbook-for-the-next-generation-of-startup-comp.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'd encourage anyone really interested in Wil's advice and info to buy the paperback -- I did. But if you want to check out the book online, you can download the pdf. It seems to be a legit and legal link to a straightforward download on Wil's gobig site.</comment>


Researchers use image noise pattern to detect doctored images - <AUTHOR> http://www.albany.edu/news/26046.php?WT.eml

<comment><USER2> Research paper: [http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/homepage/PUBLICATIONS_files/IC...](http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/homepage/PUBLICATIONS_files/ICCP.pdf)</comment>


How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189984/How_I_Used_EVE_Online_to_Predict_the_Great_Recession.php <comment><USER2> I like the idea of a hot potato effect caused by taxes that match the 'real' value of an asset. This should apply not just to real assets (like houses) but the current commodity value of a 'future' in any other value.

I had desired such a tool relative to speculation on the stock markets (and at the time postulated that requiring whoever 'owned' a future __must__ receive it when it comes due); however the idea of taxing that invested value while it is held seems to be an even cleaner way of handling the problem.

<comment><USER3> In the Netherlands (and probably other countries too) this effect is used the other way around - there is a large tax on savings, from 1.6% to 5% depending on the assets, that actually incentivizes moving cash to more speculative investments.

Regarding futures, I was under the impression that's how it works - if a contract expires on your hand, you have to take delivery. There are a few funny stories around of that happening accidentally to paper traders.

<comment><USER4> This seems like it's basically a sustainable way to achieve the same effects that inflation is typically used to achieve in western economies.

<comment><USER5> The Dutch more or less invented the Western economic model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "How I predicted x": flipped a coin, forgot about the times it was wrong!

<comment><USER7> I understand what you're saying about selection bias, but he has given a reasoned argument, providing a model that matched reality in multiple places. You're response of "it doesn't always work" is without value unless it provides an example of where it doesn't work.

<comment><USER8> His prediction would carry a lot more weight if he had written about it prior to the recession. A lot of people can say "I predicted that" after it happened, but those who have proof they can point to have a lot more credibility. All he has is that he "won a bet" after a "conversation with a friend."

Unless he was wrote about it ahead of time, we have no way of knowing whether he also made a similar bet with another friend in a different conversation to say that housing prices were going to continue towards the moon. If he had also structured the bet in which he got his school payed for and seemingly no downside if he lost, then he could have guaranteed free school, and looked like Nostradamus either way.

So it's quite possible that this is selection bias at work, and he "flips coins" on a regular basis and only brags about the ones that come up heads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What he predicted was a correction to a housing bubble. Specifically, it seems, the Californian housing bubble.

There is nothing particularly special about housing bubbles and their correction. This happens all the time.

What he didn't predict was the effect that that correction in 2008 would have on the global financial system. That's because you'd need to include securitisation, how the big players were holding risk and the effect of perceived credit worthiness on short term liquidity.

A while ago, when I looked into this, I found just one paper, written prior to the crash, that could reasonably be considered to have predicted what occurred. Unfortunately, I can't find it, if I do I'll add the link.

<comment><USER10> And even if you did find something, how would you know if they were just lucky or truly prescient ?

Folks are constantly predicting gloom and doom. Some have even made successful careers out of it, their low probability of predicting such catastrophes not withstanding.

Relatedly there were several economists predicting bad things. [https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp0827...](https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp082705)

Its easier to say bad things will happen and be right eventually, the much much much harder part is to get the timing right.

<comment><USER9> That's my point. The paper didn't predict bad things happening.

It specifically said that banks were holding higher level tranches of CDOs. Because they're MTM accounted they could suddenly drop in value if default rates increase. This, in turn, could cause other banks to suspect their creditworthiness and pull their funding lines.

In other words, it was very specific about what it thought a collapse mechanism was and it turned out to be spot on.

I don't believe they were either lucky or prescient. I think that they were well informed and joined the dots in a way that few others had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yet another piece of evidence for why we should implement Land Value Taxation.

<comment><USER12> Not to self-promote too heavily, but I did an episode of my georgism-centric radio show about this very article[0].

Videogames really offer a fun space to explore economic instruments-- treating the real world as a laboratory is a _bit_ more dangerous.

[0] [http://seethecat.org/ep/2017-09-12.html](http://seethecat.org/ep/2017-09-12.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it would be more impressive if you predict the NEXT recession.

<comment><USER14> Someone will figure it out with Steam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used EVE ESI API (realtime cached in-game data) to test my resource management software. It turned out to be very close to final "real world" data.

Disclaimer: Its for my own use only. Didn't sell it or even make available to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER16> How I predicted the housing market crash in 2005...

Office Mate: We're making an offer on a $650K house.

Me: I know roughly what you make. Did a rich uncle die?

Office Mate: No but our lender said we can afford it.

Me: How much of your take home pay will go toward your mortgage?

Office Mate: About 60%

Me to my wife: Honey, we're cashing in our lottery ticket and leaving California.

<comment><USER17> Happening here in Sri Lanka. Still waiting for the market crash to happen. People are spending upwards of 70% on all their leasing across housing, expensive cars, and luxury items like 65 inch TVs not to mention CC bills. Banks have started buying up debts and offering refinancing plans. Meanwhile I'm hunkering down and saving cash wondering if I'll get lucky

<comment><USER18> You could be waiting a while. If a government with good control over a sovereign currency doesn't want a housing crash to happen, it can forestall it for a long, long time by keeping interest rates low. People were predicting a housing crash in the US starting in 2003, and people have been predicting one in Australia for a decade.

<comment><USER19> What can force an interest rate rise?

Right now I can't afford a house and would love to know the conditions that would increase interest rates.

<comment><USER20> Defaults can cause interest rates to rise, which happen when expectations aren't met. Such as labor costs rising more than expected, causing businesses to default on their loans or shortage of a natural resource causing it's price to spike. It can then cause a chain reaction of defaults and interest rates rise to reflect the increased risk premium. Unfortunately, due to lags in the feedback loop, this is inevitable as you can never accurately predict the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "I mean that when a tax or rent is paid in EVE, this does not cycle back into the economy, it just magically disappears. In the real world, when a property tax is paid it cycles back into the economy through expenditures on public infrastructure such as education and road maintenance" "

Interesting - there's not a way to develop something in the game that could cycle it back in?

<comment><USER22> There is and there has been!

Simply cycling it back in is certainly doable, and arguably already done (or approximated) - I'd argue it's more the local infrastructure deterioration/modeling that isn't (fully) simulated in EvE, for NPC infastructure. A couple of gamedev terms:

\- Cash faucets - sources of currency generation / magically introduced into the economy, functionally equivalent to the bank printing currency in the real world.

\- Cash sinks - places where currency is magically destroyed / taken out of the economy, functionally equivalent to the bank destroying old currency in the real world.

If your cash faucets and sinks exactly balance each other out, you could look at it as the bank simply reinvesting the currency instead of creating and destroying an exactly equal amount - externally, the net effect is identical. Of course, this is rarely the case - both in games _and_ in real life. For the currency to be "healthy" and serve a purpose in a player economy, you want to avoid faucets outnumbering sinks to the point that you have extremely inflation. E.g. in Diablo 2, one would barter in known rare items - gold is effectively worthless, there are few effective sinks to sink it into.

(Games of course usually use an impossible number of magical faucets and sinks - the kind of centrally planned economy that would require a star trek style post-scarcity environment run by complete and utter LARPing fanatics to ever pull off, contrasted to our current real world where you maybe have a single state bank trying to carefully control inflation with a currency printing lever.)

Returning to EvE online: They still have a bunch of magical zero-maintenance infrastructure in "high security" space, but they've also added a lot of player buildable infrastructure that generally needs fueling and defense. If you don't pay for a road's upkeep in real life, it starts to get a few potholes. If you don't pay to maintain and defend your player owned stations in EvE online (be it through your money or your material and your time), someone's going to blow it up or take it from you - for amusement, profit, or both. This is a _much_ stronger deterioration of infrastructure than you generally see in real life. (I forget how much of this player buildable infrastructure predates this article, if any.)

<comment><USER23> And here is a graph about the cash sinks and faucets: [https://images.contentful.com/7lhcm73ukv5p/2mCQPkfNbWw0K2E64...](https://images.contentful.com/7lhcm73ukv5p/2mCQPkfNbWw0K2E64awEWw/86249411c0b1835a6897ecc26d22f56d/9a_sinksfaucets.png)

Taken from the monthly report: [https://www.eveonline.com/article/p3j6gs/monthly-economic- re...](https://www.eveonline.com/article/p3j6gs/monthly-economic-report- january-2018)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thougt it funny to spend a huge realestate tax increase on building aditional houses. Then do the same with food and utilities. Like government tossing the hot potato into the air and catching it again.

</comment><comment><USER25> Bookmarked this thread. Does anyone have information on what the current state of the global economy is and if we are facing another recession imminently?

<comment><USER26> I will tell you my predictions in 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Previous discussion here:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158868

Side note, why is this story allowed to remain on the front page yet this one from 4 hours ago was removed with 22 upvotes on the front page:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468939

Bias? Selective rule enforcing? Both links are high quality technical reports. There's clearly a feature for PAST submissions on each HN link.

<comment><USER28> From the FAQ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)):

> _" How are stories ranked?"_

> _" The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story > was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way."_

> _" Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, > software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator > intervention."_

<comment><USER27> Right, so moderator intervention... which still leaves those questions.

<comment><USER28> The prior discussion was from 42 days ago. From what I've observed and seen mentioned, normally if the previous discussion is from a year ago or more, then it won't be marked a dupe.

If you think something was done unfairly, the best way to get an authoritative response is to email the mods via the Contact link in the footer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A PHP clone of Panic's status board - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anchepiece/statuspanic <comment><USER2> Hey folks, I am ajb, the creator of status panic. I had originally created it in a night and it hasn't been updated in a long time. The interest today surprises and shocks me! (Even though it's a fork which is linked..) I was never super happy with how the modules get loaded and the ability to provide dynamic data is, as several have pointed out, a bit lackluster. That said, I've got some ideas for improvement, and am open to pull requests - lets fix the flaws and make it usable! I would love nothing more then to get a screenshot of somebody using statuspanic in a real world environment.

Hacker News, you humble me.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem is that it's a really tailored solution for Panic's team and that's why it works - for them. Some careful considerations should be put forward to create a interchangeable system that any business could tailor to its needs (easily). A good start, although graphically speaking it's not sex on screen.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you don't want to build your own there are also a couple SaaS solutions:

<http://www.leftronic.com/> \- A YC company that productizes the Panic concept. Very impressive list of investors.

<http://www.geckoboard.com/> \- Slick looking and comes with access to a bunch of core services.

<comment><USER5> Paul from Geckoboard here, always happy to help people set up their status board and discuss individual requirements. Feel free to drop me a line, email in profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love Panic, and it heartens me to read things like this, from the bottom of the post that describes Panic's status board:

"And no, it didn't slow down development on [insert the app you want the most here]. Check the board!"

Whenever Panic shows off something cool, they get a flurry of comments from people who want the next version of Transmit or Coda (that would be me) or, now that it's released, Prompt.

Panic's stuff is so good that their customers don't want them wasting their time doing anything but getting out the next version of [insert the app you want most here]. A lot of people don't realize, however, that you need to take time out to do these sorts of side projects if you hope to maintain your motivation and morale. Panic's work is a labor of love, not the result of a death march.

<comment><USER7> They're a great shop and I appreciate all they've produced. As much as everyone wants [insert the app you want the most here] updated ASAP, I've never heard anyone say "I wish you spent three months less on this so I could get it sooner" when that software was released.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say I e-mail them regularly (they may disagree) but when I run into a problem with Coda, usually related to abusing the tab bar by opening a score or so documents, occasionally design ideas pop in my head, and I send them off to them. I have faith that they're going to come up with something nifty and useful, so I just write and feel confident they'll use or discard my ideas as appropriate.

Which reminds me, there's a problem with blockediting that I ran across a week or so ago that I want to tell them about. To my mail client…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The canonical repo appears to be here:

<https://github.com/ajb/statuspanic>

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow this is apt, I spent all last week looking at almost every public repo in github with the word dashboard and I was honestly surprised after almost a year that no one had made a decent open source clone of the beautiful panic status board

</comment><comment><USER10> This is nice. Though the visual appearance is a bit clunky.

<comment><USER11> It's supposed to be clunky. It's meant to be displayed fullscreen on a high resolution display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A screenshot & more info on what the Panic Status Board actually is at:

<http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Obviously a good start -- but most modules are fed with static data. Including the project sizes, etc. Would be great if one could f.ex. just pull this from Jira/Greenhopper/whathaveyou

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, I was looking for such project especially to monitor existing projects via Atom or RSS by displaying a sparkline ( [http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0...](http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1) ) per project where you can see the number of commits over the days.

<comment><USER2> You could provide dynamic data such as this but it would have to be on a per- module basis. Sounds like Atom/RSS would be a nice addition!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Few small layout issues: a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom moves along with the ticker. The ticket text itself is cut off horizontally in FF 3.6.16 on Mac.

<comment><USER15> He notes:

"This will currently work best on a WebKit browser such as Safari or Chrome. It will also work on Firefox, but I'm not testing it there very often, so it will always be a couple versions behind."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any screenshots available?

<comment><USER17> There is an example installation here: <http://allynbauer.com/software/statuspanic></comment></comment>


NY Times Claims Elon Musk Breaks CEO Pay Record - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/elon-musk-breaks-ceo-pay-record-5016546/ <comment><AUTHOR> in reality he is getting paid minimum wage. He only gets stock if he hits milestones that are set impossibly high

<comment><USER2> But muh stock value = money value

If he sold 100% of his stock like he was cashing out TSLA wouldn't be worth as much.</comment></comment>


Investigating aerial WiFi attacks at Standing Rock protests - <AUTHOR> http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2418-the-standing-rock-hacks-cracked-unravels-real-conspiracy.html <comment><USER2> This looks like some script kiddy stuff. The stingrays, etc are already working fine. The whole protest is a farce, and this reporting is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's internet outrage when this is done overseas, but we need _cracked_ (who despite their name do publish real articles these days) to let us know that it's going on the US?

I'd though that stingrays were passive MITM devices, not jammers.</comment>


Introduction to K-means Clustering - <AUTHOR> https://www.datascience.com/blog/introduction-to-k-means-clustering-algorithm-learn-data-science-tutorials <comment><USER2> K-means is based on some quite wild assumptions - your data follows a specific case of the Gaussian distribution. Plus side is that the algorithm is relatively easy to understand and implement so it is a good starting point into clustering.

When you got this, then next step is probably to consider if the centroid is really a good representation of the distribution of your data. If you still believe that your data is about to follow some form of Gaussian distribution then K-means can be levelled up with the EM algorithm.

More over, if you are faced with some crazy multidimensional data then it may be fair first try to reduce the dimensionality of the data with the PCA or t-SNE algorithm or with combination of both. Or perhaps use autoencoders.

<comment><USER3> What about data that generally follows something more like a power law distribution? How would you cluster that?

<comment><USER4> scikit-learn's materials (amazing in general) has a nice overview of their clustering methods and how they perform with some test data sets: [http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html)

How would you even cluster a power law distribution? There's nothing that distinguishes in two or more groups?

<comment><USER3> A lot of online engagement data looks like a power law distribution on large platforms. The mean (obviously) has huge variance. Say you have multiple metrics per user like this. You can still apply k-means but the huge variance makes it rather ineffective. That's what I've found, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite cluster algorithm comparison:

[http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/scikit-learn- contrib/hdbs...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/scikit-learn- contrib/hdbscan/blob/master/notebooks/Comparing%20Clustering%20Algorithms.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER6> That is a lot of text for such a simple algorithm, the regular implementation:

1\. K observations are chosen randomly from the dataset as initial means.

2\. K clusters are created by associating every observation with its nearest mean.

3\. The centroid of each of the K clusters becomes the new mean.

Steps 2 and 3 are repeated until we reach convergence. Very simple cases are badly clustered with this algorithm: [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*BGSo8t0ktVLDn4Chv...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*BGSo8t0ktVLDn4ChvH23kA.png) (an example with K=2). However, it is the simplest clustering algorithm thus a good start for people who want to start learning about this field!

<comment><USER7> > until we reach convergence

You forgot to explain why (if) this algorithm converges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wrote a JS implementation and tutorial on k-means a few years back [1], if anyone is looking for this in the browser. Great writeup, I appreciate the math focus!

[1] [http://burakkanber.com/blog/machine-learning-k-means- cluster...](http://burakkanber.com/blog/machine-learning-k-means-clustering- in-javascript-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER9> In my experiments K-Means clustering proved to be super useful to detect malicious activities, cyberattacks and all kind of suspicious behaviors without knowing any rules or patterns in advance.

Here's how K-Means with K=20 detected malicious activity within real world, live web server - just by selecting smallest clusters (bottom table shows specifics about what fallen into smallest clusters - all hits but the first one are attempt to exploit web application by some nefarious actors):

[http://imgur.com/a/l3EGW](http://imgur.com/a/l3EGW)

This is built using free version of Splunk with free machine learning toolkit addon.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if that's really Kmeans, as it tend to work well only when the size of the clusters are approximately the same.

Or maybe splunk labels it as Kmeans when it really is some other algorithm.

<comment><USER9> Actually it K-Means applied after PCA (to reduce dimensionality) and after Standard Scaling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you find this interesting, you may also enjoy my introduction to k-means clustering, in which I implement Lloyd's algorithm and use it to classify handwritten digits:

[http://johnloeber.com/docs/kmeans.html](http://johnloeber.com/docs/kmeans.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> See also self-organizing maps. They seem more robust. See e.g. [1].

[1] [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3ffe/8f8a7b0d00297e0cd74d20...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3ffe/8f8a7b0d00297e0cd74d20b5d936349d6cbc.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> I created a visualization of k-means for some people at my school a few months ago. I'll put it here for anyone who might be interested.

[https://github.com/tylerhou/kmeans](https://github.com/tylerhou/kmeans)

<comment><USER13> I've also done a visualization: [http://www.darynr.com/kmeans.htm](http://www.darynr.com/kmeans.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In a previous life I've implemented news clustering algorithms for a couple of companies.

I wasn't impressed with the results with k-means and I've always found that agglomerative clustering algorithms to work better for natural text documents.

</comment><comment><USER15> I made a simpler example of k-means clustering in JavaScript. Demonstrating the concept.

[https://nxsheet.com/sheets/56fb78812efc70776ddce752](https://nxsheet.com/sheets/56fb78812efc70776ddce752)</comment>


Y Combinator Resources for Developers - <AUTHOR> https://yc.dev <comment><USER2> Should this list filter companies that are shutdown or have been acquired and no longer have an active product? Many of the links are "our incredible journey" acquihire announcements or just 404. I understand and appreciate the value of having a list of all developer services companies that have gone through YC, but as a developer resource page it's annoying to see a product that might fit my needs but is long shutdown.

<comment><USER3> Good point - I'll filter those out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is Paul Graham and Robert Morris's Arc language[a] being used for anything _in production_ other than Y Combinator websites?

[a] [http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/)

<comment><USER5> I don't _think_ so, although as the sibling says there is hobby activity. Interestingly enough, though, reddit was originally written in arc, but they later rewrote it in python. Make of that what you will.

<comment><USER6> As sibling said, reddit was CL before it was Python. But more importantly, reddit predates Arc by more than two years. :)

And the main reason reddit was rewritten was library support. Doing simple things in CL was hard because you had to write it from scratch, but doing those things in Python was a simple library install.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious because I thought the main draw of CL was that it was easy as heck to roll your own library support.

<comment><USER6> It's easy to roll anything in CL if you know what you're doing, but making it talk wsgi or generate pngs isn't trivial, no matter what language you're writing it in.

<comment><USER8> CL implementations do have an FFI that you could at least call C libraries from, don't they?

<comment><USER6> I think so? I honestly don't know, I never really worked with the CL codebase, I just used it for reference sometimes. But even if it did, I'm not sure how much velocity is gained by using CL vs. Python, especially when making a web app, where there are so many examples, libraries, and frameworks out there to help in Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to scan down the relevant YC companies list, but it's really hard for a human to visually parse: [https://i.imgur.com/1u457oA.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/1u457oA.jpg)

A little white space would be helpful.

<comment><USER10> Looks like they were in a hurry to get this site out.

<comment><USER11> I'm seeing a lot of this with the .dev sites.

<comment><USER12> I don't see why .dev domains would have tighter deadlines than .com.

<comment><USER13> Because if you don't launch today, people won't see that you were eager to spend as much money on the domain as possible (i.e. for Phase 1)...

<comment><USER14> If you run WHOIS on yc.dev you'll see that it was created prior to the beginning of the early access period yesterday. Also see: [https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announ...](https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announcement-10apr14-en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Beating the Averages

> A classic article on using powerful programming languages as a secret weapon

I'm surprised this is included given that it's been more or less been proven to be false. Almost every valuable company in the past 2 decades was built on a blub language. Facebook even used PHP! Java and C++ are at the core of most Amazon and Google services. There basically haven't been any big companies build on a lisp-like language unless you consider Scala, but even the most companies adopted that later.

edit: blub

<comment><USER16> > it's been more or less been proven to be false

Not really. It's true that few big winners have used Lisp, but that would only disprove the thesis if there were also companies who _tried_ using Lisp and failed. AFAICT, no one is even doing the experiment.

I actually know of two notable counterexamples: Barefoot Networks has an internal design tool written in Common Lisp that is a significant source of competitive advantage for them. Also Orbitz.

<comment><USER17> If not commercial Lisp, what you think about using Racket for both the IDE and so they can pre-scale by giving HtDP to good developers who want to learn Scheme?

<comment><USER16> The rule I always apply to such questions is: whatever works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just noticed that clicking on 'About YC' (top, next to YC logo), results in a 404. Looks like the link contains a '/' too much: [https://www.ycombinator.com//about/](https://www.ycombinator.com//about/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Wish they didn't use the .dev extension.

It should be developers.ycombinator.com

<comment><USER19> Yeah, have to update my local DNS routes. I had .dev pointed to 127.0.0.1

<comment><USER20> This has been the topic of HN for the past few days for anything .dev.

You should be using .test or .localhost for any development domains: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#section-2](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#section-2)

<comment><USER21> .corp, .home, and .lan are also reserved, just not codified into an RFC yet.

<comment><USER22> > .corp, .home, and .lan are also reserved, just not codified into an RFC yet.

They aren't reserved as the term is usually used for domains. Reservations don't exist in outside of those codified in RFCs; the IANA is the party that reserves domains and the full current list of reserved special use domains is here:

[https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain- names/sp...](https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain- names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml)

More general info on reserved domains is here:

[https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved](https://www.iana.org/domains/reserved)

Note that of those domains you falsely describe as reserved, .home _was_ suggested as a special use domain in RFC 7788, but that was updated by RFC 8375 to the reserved domain .home.arpa.

.home, .corp, and .mail (but not .lan, AFAICT) are subject to a ICANN policy decision against granting delegations as TLDs, though, which means they won't become real TLDs while that policy is in effect (it doesn't mean they won't get reserved for a use which might conflict with what you might adopt them for, the way .local has for some uses, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I guess we finally found out who paid early access for the .dev TLD.

<comment><USER24> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_period](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_period)

<comment><USER14> Also [https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announ...](https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announcement-10apr14-en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought that the .dev extension had mandatory HTTPS due to HSTS preload. Yet, this loads as "Not Secure" HTTP for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to [https://get.dev/#benefits](https://get.dev/#benefits): >The .dev top-level domain is included on the HSTS preload list, making HTTPS required on all connections to .dev websites and pages without needing individual HSTS registration or configuration.

What browser are you using that you are not redirected to [https://yc.dev](https://yc.dev)?

>Most major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE 11 and Edge) also have HSTS preload lists based on the Chrome list. (See the HSTS compatibility matrix.)

<comment><USER26> iOS Safari (and other iOS browsers) auto redirects to [http://ycombinator.dev/](http://ycombinator.dev/)

<comment><USER14> Can you confirm that it's not rewriting the URL to [https://yc.dev](https://yc.dev) first before issuing a request to the network? It's possible that Safari has suffered some kind of regression. This definitely used to work at some point.

I can confirm here in Chrome and Firefox that the URL is rewritten internally to [https://yc.dev](https://yc.dev) (which then redirects to [https://ycombinator.dev](https://ycombinator.dev)), so no unencrypted traffic is ever sent over the network.

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately I'm not in a situation where I can test that. It's very possible that that's the case, but it then leaves the question of why the non-https ycombinator.dev is what we eventually end up on.

<comment><USER14> Separate from HSTS, they should also be redirecting http to https. Hopefully they'll get around to that soon. The domain is still recent so they're probably not finished with configuration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder how many of the YC companies use the other YC companies. And which are the most / least used. How much effort do you reckon is put in trying to "align" them and keep them aligned? As in there's a consistency in (e.g.) docs, APIs, etc.

<comment><USER20> I would bet Stripe is the most used.

<comment><USER28> Dropbox?

<comment><USER20> Most all of the domains on the list are using GSuite, so I would think at least some use Google drive instead of Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Under the " _Ask a Female Engineer_ " heading, I wish they would include a link to [https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a- wom...](https://communequation.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/im-not-a-woman-in- tech/) for an alternate viewpoint, in order to reduce the echo chamber effect.

<comment><USER30> It would be nice if there was an "Ask a Male Engineer" blog section also to get a more diverse viewpoint. It would be interesting to see the differences or similarities in opinions, perspectives and experiences of both genders. Or maybe just an "Ask an Engineer" blog where both genders' views are provided.

<comment><USER31> I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think we all know that "ask an engineer" means "ask a male engineer" 99% of the time.

Edit: I was just guessing at the ratio of male to female engineers, so maybe I overestimated the imbalance, but I think the point stands.

<comment><USER32> I mean, it looks like 21% of all engineering degrees went to women, which is the easiest way to guesstimate the job data (and is generally how they guess the percentage of women in the workplace, along with questionaires). I get that you're being pedantic, before you start to explain yourself, but still.

EDIT: Maybe tax forms, but I'm not sure the legality of that... but I think it's still the census.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is "Beating the Averages" still relevant in 2019?

I see it pretty high up on the site, and I thought the consensus is that nowadays most languages have enough lispy and functional features to give similar productivity.

 _Is there any benefit from hyperflexible languages high enough to outweigh the benefits of readily available libraries?_

<comment><USER34> It's hard to do reproducible experiments measuring productivity, but my personal opinion is it's still relevant. I say that as someone doing mostly JavaScript and TypeScript development day by day. I often miss the clean syntax and macro facilities of Scheme. I used to use Kawa Scheme a lot, which runs on the JVM, so readily available libraries were never a problem.

Libraries, documentation and community are reasons to use non-Lisp languages for certain projects, but if you don't have some kind of Lisp in your toolbox, you're still missing out in 2019, in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The [https://scaphold.io/](https://scaphold.io/) URL is down.

<comment><USER36> They were acquired by AWS and rolled into AppSync

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Link is plain http for me. I thought all .dev domains were https?

<comment><AUTHOR> >I though all .dev domains were https

If you go to [http://yc.dev](http://yc.dev), you get an HTTP 307 (Internal redirect) to [https://yc.dev](https://yc.dev).

[https://get.dev/#benefits](https://get.dev/#benefits) says: >The .dev top- level domain is included on the HSTS preload list, making HTTPS required on all connections to .dev websites and pages without needing individual HSTS registration or configuration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Had no idea Heroku went through YC, also shouldn't this include OpenAI? (edit: Thanks, missed it)

<comment><USER39> They are listed in the final section (s2016)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pardon the criticism, but I've got text running far off the screen on mobile.

Somewhat shocking to see a brand new 2019 website that isn't responsive, especially when it's not super difficult.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone know I can still reach this 'real' website if you're running Valet locally? I get 'Valet - 404 - Not Found' error, since Valet thinks 'yc' is a known Link or Address.

:(

<comment><USER41> OK, I figured it out! I switched .dev to .test domain with: `valet tld test`

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What a half-assed website. Seems quite rushed. I'd expect higher-quality information from YC.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Docker s2010 App store for server configurations.

it seems a little bit outdated

</comment><comment><USER44> Why isn't Mixpanel in this list ? It's a developer tool right?

</comment><comment><USER45> Wow, it looks like they paid $11,500 for the yc.dev and ycombinator.dev domains [1]. (I guess that's a pretty small amount of money for YC.)

I have my eye on some short .dev domains too, but I'm hoping to get one for $350.

[2] [https://domains.google/tld/dev/](https://domains.google/tld/dev/)

<comment><USER46> Someone had mentioned that there was a limited brand/copyright phase before the $11k phase that was cheaper. Pretty sure they would fall into that.

Hopefully someone who knows the details could chime in on that.

<comment><USER14> The relevant program here would be: [https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announ...](https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and- media/announcement-10apr14-en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> That site looks quite ugly because of the weird alignment (or lack thereof) of text elements.

<comment><USER38> A little padding and a small border would make it much more readable [https://i.imgur.com/D7CNgwa.png](https://i.imgur.com/D7CNgwa.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Nice advertisement.</comment>


Shor's algorithm is implemented using five trapped ions - <AUTHOR> http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2016/mar/04/shors-algorithm-is-implemented-using-five-trapped-ions <comment><USER2> We also have another discussion on the same topic here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11225298)</comment>


Will python 3 ever gain critical adoption? - <AUTHOR> http://entitycrisis.blogspot.com/2009/11/python-3-is-it-doomed.html

<comment><USER2> This topic has been beaten to death by impatient people who have no recollection or knowledge of the history of language adoption.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any resources for learning about such history? I'd be quite an interesting read I think.

<comment><USER2> In this case I am my own resource, having been a programmer for some 25 years, and observed the slow, but steady adoption of many languages.

The wishlist for 3.0, PEP 3100, was created in August, 2004. PEP 3000 was created on April 5, 2006, and marked the beginning of the development process. A year and a half later, 3.0 was released, and it hasn't even been a year since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I think Python 3 suffers from attempting to be compatible with Python 2. It should have been a clean break with major repairs and reconstruction, as the original Python 3000 was intended to be. Hang the expense, let's make this language _right_, and Python 2 be damned._

That worked really well for Perl 6 ;-)

<comment><USER5> I think I detect a hint of sarcasm.

We don't actually know about Perl 6 yet. It's still got a few more months before it's feature complete enough for use in any general case (and performance will probably take another year or two after that to come up to snuff).

But, I strongly suspect that both Perl 6 and Python 3 will be blips on the radar of language history (even while I expect to write quite a bit of code in both before then), as JavaScript will take the place of both for a large class of problems. But it'll be seven to ten years before that shift becomes apparent.

<comment><USER6> > JavaScript will take the place of both for a large class of problems. But > it'll be seven to ten years before that shift becomes apparent.

I'd believe that more if ECMAScript 4 hadn't fallen apart. I'm familiar with the PHP argument that design quality in a language doesn't necessarily harm adoption, but you do need some sort of extensibility to program more than a couple of thousand lines of code.

<comment><USER5> I think you and I have talked about this in the past. From what I know of the process and where ECMAScript 4 was going, I am not of the opinion that anything particular great has been lost by its falling apart.

JavaScript/ECMAScript evolution has not stopped just because a design-by- committee extension effort failed. There are a few issues with JavaScript for programming in the large, but they won't last. More importantly, perhaps, I think that _even if_ they weren't being fixed at a rapid clip, JavaScript would still end up an extremely popular language, probably even the most popular language, for many classes of problem. Web applications, in particular, but most applications will be web applications in the future, so the planets are aligning for JavaScript.

I will also add that damned near every major technology company has some sort of serious JavaScript effort underway, as we speak. Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, are all extremely serious about JavaScript. Several well-funded teams are building JavaScript engines, some of which are not tied to a particular browser or limited to only running within a browser. Perl and Python will _never_ have that kind of money behind them. Java was in the same position 15 years ago, but it was never a particularly good language for the Perl and Python market (as evidenced by the fact that dynamic language programmers tend to hate, or merely tolerate Java). JavaScript, on the other hand, not only had incredible corporate backing, it also has a large amount of nerd mindshare. Most of the Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. hackers I know don't mind working in JavaScript, and find it a pretty nice language. I certainly enjoy it. Sure, it is lacking a lot of niceties of those other languages, but with the kind of money and effort being spent on JavaScript, it won't be long before those issues disappear.

So, while Java took over the programming marketplace for several years, to the sound of much gnashing of teeth by dynamic language programmers, it never really won mindshare among the folks who programmed for enjoyment (FOSS, in particular). I don't think JavaScript will run into those impediments. It's a good language, and a few nitpicks about missing features or misfeatures aren't going to stop it from being a juggernaut that rolls over most other dynamic languages in terms of popularity.

<comment><USER6> > ... with the kind of money and effort being spent on JavaScript, it won't be > long before those issues disappear.

I thought that too, but Microsoft's "You can't break the Intranet!" argument was enough to kill ECMAScript 4. I lost a lot of faith in JavaScript's near term future then.

In the interest of having a more productive discussion, what concrete signs give you hope that time and money and effort will address JavaScript's missing features?

<comment><USER5> I was never under the impression that Microsoft alone killed ECMAScript 4. My impression was that pretty much everyone _except_ Adobe was dissatisfied with the process and the resulting standard. I wasn't particularly impressed with what I knew about it, either, to be honest, though my knowledge is limited, at best.

The 5th edition fixes several earlier specification failures, that led to incompatible implementations, which will resolve a number of issues with having to maintain multiple implementations of code to support multiple JavaScript engines (though this is less of a concern on the server-side).

JavaScript 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9, as found in Mozilla browsers, include block scope (with let), generators ala Python, more object methods for Array and String, etc.

JavaScript already had closures, first-class functions, reasonable scoping abilities, etc. The biggest arguments against it seem to stem from the fact that everybody has to dip into the global scope a little bit, and that OOP primitives are somewhat...primitive. But, both can be reasonably worked around, even in current implementations. Packages and modules, and advanced OOP have been implemented independently by dozens of people (much as various OO patterns have emerged from Perl's OOP primitives, including Moose, which I know you agree is the current Right Way to do OO in Perl...even though it is not part of the core language). All the major JS libraries that seek to address such things have some sort of module/package and namespace functions built in.

ECMAScript 5 even introduces a strict mode, roughly akin to strictures in Perl, and even uses roughly the same syntax to turn it on ( "use strict"; ) and it is available with function scope.

So, assuming it becomes no longer mandatory to dip your toe into global scope in every program or library (if only to start your own namespace), JavaScript will have no major issues that I'm aware of. Block scope is already more than most dynamic languages have (Ruby and Python both still lack it, as far as I know, though Perl has it), and I'm guessing that since it's been in the Mozilla JS for some time now, it's inevitable in the spec.

Anyway, despite any missing features or misfeatures you might perceive, there are already hundreds of large (hundreds of thousands of lines of code) projects in JavaScript. I just think that adoption will accelerate and expand to the server side, particularly as the few remaining issues are resolved.

I wonder what concrete signs you see that make you think that all the money and effort (which is orders of magnitude larger than the amount being spent on Perl, Python, and Ruby combined) _won't_ result in a language and implementations that are adopted widely for a large class of problems currently being solved by Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Groq Announces World's First Architecture Capable of 1 Petaops - <AUTHOR> https://groq.com/groq-announces-worlds-first-architecture-capable-of-petaops-on-a-single-chip/ <comment><USER2> I edited the submitted title, which erroneously claimed 1 PetaFlop/s. It's delivers 1 PetaOp/s (presumably 8-bit SIMD operations), 250 TeraFlop/s.</comment>


Uber stopped its own investigators from reporting crimes to the police - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/25/20883619/uber-special-investigations-crimes-police-rape-report-safety <comment><USER2> > "At the end of the day, we're not the judge and jury to determine whether a > crime has occurred," Tracey Breeden, Uber's global head of women's safety, > told the Post. "We're here to gather information, make a business decision. > We're not law enforcement."

All the more reason to give what you have to the actual law enforcement and let _them_ determine if a crime has occurred.

They are literally choosing to make more money by allowing crimes to not be prosecuted. How can anyone who is part of this sleep at night?

<comment><USER3> Don't forget the corporate double-speak:

>"We are very proud of this team's work and know they approach their jobs with tremendous compassion and understanding," the spokesperson said. "Characterizing this team as anything but providing support to people after a difficult experience is just wrong."

<comment><USER4> A good example how to say nothing in many words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >The investigators are also allegedly instructed to "first to protect Uber" and make sure it is "not held liable" for any crimes that are committed by people using the company's ride-hailing platform.

This doesn't seem much different than say interacting with HR inside your own company or anything like that.

Still a bad look and morally questionable, but at the same time I do agree that the victim can / should go to the police if they wish to.

If Uber did go to the police I wonder what guidelines there would be. Only if there is a confession? "Enough" evidence? Or just any accusation?

I can imagine a situation where a victim doesn't want to go to the police, and that is their call. I'm not sure it is Urber's job to do it for them.

<comment><USER6> This is a stereotype of HR that IMHO is not representative of the majority of people in the profession.

<comment><USER5> The majority of people in the profession don't change the incentives. They work for the company, push comes to shove that is their job.

They might help me figure out some insurance thing here or there and really care, but when it comes to something important they are there for the company, not me.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't everyone at the company... work for the company? An Engineering Manager has an incentive to overwork engineers to a hit a deadline -- and, yes, sometimes that happens! -- but in addition to just being a bad thing to do, that comes at a huge long term cost to the business. It's much better for the company and the employees to not overwork them. If HR is doing it right, supporting the company and supporting its employees are compatible goals.

<comment><USER7> > supporting the company and supporting its employees are compatible goals.

Until an employee does something that puts themselves at odds with the company. At which point HR is the tip of the spear when it comes to protecting the company from that employee. "Here's how to let them go legally." "Here's how we bribe them into not talking bad about us." "Here's our zero tolerance policy we can fit our employee firing into."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course not. The team exists specifically to avoid police (and then at one point, _press_ ) involvement.

It's like sports teams that have their own anti-doping initiatives - not to catch cheaters, but to catch them before the authorities can and sink you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure why we don't refer to the original reporting from which this was based:

"When rides go wrong: How Uber's investigations unit works to limit the company's liability"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/25/ubers-i...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/25/ubers- investigations-unit-finds-what-went-wrong-rides-its-never-companys-fault/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitter here.

Simple: WP is paywalled.

Generally I agree that it's good practice to submit the original source. In this case and since the Verge article is pretty concise I thought it's the better choice.

Mods: Feel free to change the link if you deem it appropriate.

<comment><USER10> Non-paywalled version: [https://outline.com/wd6Y6k](https://outline.com/wd6Y6k)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Uber told the Post that it's "the victim's choice to report an incident to > police," a position the company tells The Verge it arrived at after > consulting experts. That said, the company has started giving people the > "option to allow [Uber] to contact law enforcement on their behalf"

This is a reasonable policy and this sentence completely desensationalizes the premise of the article

<comment><USER12> Yeah I was just thinking of the opposite.. if Uber recorded all rides and screened them for felonies. Someone playfully hits someone in the backseat and Uber calls it in "just in case".

Seems like it should be up to the victim if they want to press charges.

That said I think Uber is trying to avoid the lawsuit regarding "you guys need to do more to screen your drivers!" Taking more responsibility about their drivers actions. The lawsuit is bound to happen eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm watching a case on a personal basis right now. A friend of mine was raped at gunpoint by an Uber driver, who was stalking her neighborhood looking for her the next day. And NOLA cops aren't exactly helpful to the poorer residents there... "911 Is a Joke" indeed.

We'll see what Uber does. The thing is, they own a device that tracks the driver's movements. They know who he picked up, and where, and if the car stopped, and where. That's a lot of evidence to hand to police.

</comment><comment><USER14> > The special investigations team inside Uber [..] is not allowed to [..] file > official police reports "even when they get confessions of felonies,"

One step above "snitches get stitches". Are such contracts/instructions even remotely legal?

Edit: By legal, I don't mean enforceable. Rather, I mean isn't giving such an instruction itself a criminal act?

</comment><comment><USER15> I feel a war of the hiveminds coming on.

"Never ever ever ever talk to police, they're pure evil and there cannot ever be some conceivable benefit to doing so."

'Why, oh why, didn't Uber report everything to the police?'

People who sympathize with both mentalities, what are your thoughts on distinguishing the cases here?

<comment><USER16> My position is "never talk to police without an attorney" -(although this wouldn't apply if I were reporting a crime). Uber has plenty of attorneys either way. There is no conflict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > the company has started giving people the "option to allow [Uber] to contact > law enforcement on their behalf" if the customer is reporting an incident > that may be a crime, according to the Post.

</comment><comment><USER18> My next web search will concern corporate psychology, and studies that explore the mindsets employees within an organization adopt resulting from the influence of leadership. These mindsets inevitably leak out into society, and are evident in the defenses offered to the indefensible behavior described in the article. Of course, there is nothing illegal here in that apparently customers are allowed the option of reporting the crimes themselves, however when you consider that perhaps there was not so subtle manipulation from investigators which may have discouraged such reports (the careful wording described, though following certain lines, indicates no boundary that can't be crossed to protect the organization), the situation clearly describes a bit of an ethical crisis. To attempt to paint it as commonplace in other organizations does an egregious disservice to the majority of companies that carry out business honorably everyday. This is only another example of tech organizations that sprung up without mature business people to run them and more budget than anything which grow much faster than is healthy and end up doing anything to survive. This trend will unfortunately continue as the concept of value and profitability continues to lose definition in our economy.

</comment><comment><USER19> The gall! Do they think they are a University Title IX Office or something?

</comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't give me much hope for the future of Uber. Which crimes will not be reported by Uber? Where will they draw the line? Murder? Rape?

<comment><USER21> What about all of the crimes they commit? Or are skirting regulations and breaking laws not crimes anymore?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Remember when Uber disabled the emergency braking system in an autonomous vehicle and killed a person?

They're not an ethical company. They think it's acceptable to put dangerous, unproven technology in the hands of teenagers and subsequently killed a person that a normal human driver would not have hit.

</comment><comment><USER23> While uber is a shifty as hell company at best I am not sure if they are wrong here without any mandated reporter requirements.

While it is a bad look one "oops" from something that looks bad could cause harm to an innocent party for what victimized parties usually report already. That could rightfully lead to them being at fault in a multimillion dollar lawsuit and even worse headlines like "Uber got kids taken away from Gold Star father". Seems shitty but the right thing to do at scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the main issue here is the public face they try to maintain (we're a changed company, tech bro' dude culture is now erradicated, we take security very seriously, etc ad nauseum) with what they are really pulling off in the back end.

Namely the exact same shit that they always did.

Do they still charge $1 "security" surcharge, which Uber actually just pocketed?

<comment><USER24> How can Uber pocket this surcharge? Clearly Uber pays for background checks, insurance as well as the investigators mentioned here.

<comment><AUTHOR> _How can Uber pocket this surcharge?_

Oh, they absolutely did[1]

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-449-million-safe- rides-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-449-million-safe-rides- fees-2016-8?r=US&IR=T)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coming on Kickstarter – Indigenous Craftsmen Shoes - <AUTHOR> http://markhor.co/k

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, we have been working for over 6 months on our first shoe collection. This will be launched on Kickstarter as we need backers to successfully launch it.

Would really appreciate any feedback on the landing page or product itself.</comment>


Show HN: nnn – The missing terminal file browser for X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jarun/nnn/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> What is the meaning of X here? It doesn't depend on X11, does it?</comment>


Was Bitcoin Created by This International Drug Dealer? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/was-bitcoin-created-by-this-international-drug-dealer-maybe/ <comment><USER2> Even though there's no good answers here, I still enjoyed reading this. It's as much about the process and the hype as it is about trying to answer yes/no. In the end he decides it's a maybe, and that's probably good enough for now. It's a fun little piece.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, it's not Paul, but wouldn't it be ironic if it turned out that the designer and architect of the original Bitcoin protocol was (partially) responsible for putting him behind bars?

</comment><comment><USER4> My favorite part of this is that there's a clear reason for the Satoshi coins to have never been spent. Like the article says, the only other theories that allow for that are Satoshi being something like a nation-state.

</comment><comment><USER5> The speculation that Paul Le Roux (the developer of TrueCrypt's precursor E4M, and the suspected coauthor of TrueCrypt) is Satoshi Nakamoto has a long history, but ultimately many found that it was still unpersuasive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone analyzed the coding style of E4M and compared it to the original Bitcoin release?

Coding style may not be as unique to an individual as prose, but it would be an interesting smoke test.

<comment><AUTHOR> They mention it in the article and couldn't come to any conclusions.

      I don't see anything that stands out as saying these couldn't have been written by the same person (especially separated by a decade)," he wrote. "Nor do I see any similarity that wouldn't also be true for many other authors and codebases. At a minimum, however, if they were written by the same person that person's styles changed a lot (either due to time or intentionally hiding them).

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I hadn't gotten that far in the article yet. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another interesting article on this topic .... [http://cryp7o.me/pujs9](http://cryp7o.me/pujs9)</comment>


posix-spawn: a faster fork+exec for ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rtomayko/posix-spawn#readme

<comment><USER2> This is awesome, Aman's one of my favorite rubyists, I can't say I'm surprised to find out he's behind this.

If anyone's curious how processes/threads are represented internally on modern linux kernels, I wrote an article on that here: [http://blog.andrewvc.com/fork2-is-dead-long-live-fork-i- mean...](http://blog.andrewvc.com/fork2-is-dead-long-live-fork-i-mean-clone2)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great article. I came across it while hacking on posix-spawn and it was quite useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, check out the Linux vs OSX graphs. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why they are _that_ different? The worst OSX fork + exec call is more than 2x faster than the fastest fork + exec on Linux, and over 10x faster when the memory increases past ~300MB.

Given that OSX's isn't dependent on page table size, I'm guessing it just always does copy-on-write... but that's a pretty un-knowledgeable guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason fork is so slow on Linux is because the default page size is 4k. This means for a 300MB process, 76800 page table entries have to be copied during the fork.

There are ways to enable HugeTBL on linux to increase the page size, which can improve fork performance as well. See [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2731531/faster-forking- of...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2731531/faster-forking-of-large- processes-on-linux/2874009#2874009), <http://linuxgazette.net/155/krishnakumar.html> and <http://sourceforge.net/projects/libhugetlbfs/>

Does anyone know how fork is implemented on BSD/OSX and why it doesn't exhibit the same characteristics?

<comment><USER4> BSD / OS X has native support for superpages.

From version 2.6.38, Linux will get native huge page / superpage support too. <http://lwn.net/Articles/423584/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious what the applications are where this is an important optimization. Even for the very large Linux processes, it looks like 1/10sec per fork. On OSX, we're talking milliseconds. What sort of application is forking so often that this matters?

<comment><USER6> If you use a basic process-per-connection model (select/fork/accept), 10 forks per second is not that much. The "classic Unix" Ruby HTTP servers like Unicorn do just that. (Apache 1.3 and at least one 2.x worker module also work this way, but Apache uses some tricks like preforking and recycling workers to make this fast - I'm not sure the Ruby servers do, too.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unicorn pre-forks workers upfront. New processes are not created per request.

posix-spawn is also only useful for fork+exec, where the new process starts executing a new binary. This is not the case in unicorn or resque, where the child processes actually need to be copies of the parent.

We're currently using posix-spawn in albino and grit, which execute external commands like `pygmentize` and `git`

<comment><USER6> Yes, you're right, of course. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the full announcement: <https://gist.github.com/e0d36c881e6efc57514b></comment>


Akiyoshi's illusion pages - <AUTHOR> http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

<comment><USER2> Considering the tricks of palette shifting [1] and stuff that old computer and console games used to make computationally cheap animated backgrounds, does anyone know if there were computer games that used optical illusions for "computationally super-cheap animations"?

[1] [http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...](http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5)

<comment><USER3> I was thinking the same thing - my guess is that these illusions rely on particular visual patterns and colors that don't lend themselves well to video games.

One thing I'm interested in is getting video games to take advantage of eye tracking and foveal vision for perf gains. I thought I saw a prototype somewhere that did this but I can't dig it up at the moment...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really cool! Just to make sure there was nothing funny with the web page (not that I thought so, but still), I printed the Rotating Snakes picture on paper. Sure enough, they still appear to rotate, even on paper.

<comment><USER5> You might be interested to learn that cats can also perceive this illusion: [http://geekologie.com/2013/03/cat-can-see-spinning- optical-i...](http://geekologie.com/2013/03/cat-can-see-spinning-optical- illusion-tr.php)

<comment><USER6> Ha! A cross-species evolutionary bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Absolutely superb. And I'm doing an optical illusions special with my students this week too so this goldmine is perfectly timed. Thanks!

My favourite are the colour ones. I stare and stare at them trying to isolate the bit that - for example - is actually grey but looks red, to see its "true" colour. That level of concentration...not really ever seeing the grey, but perhaps objects behind me in the room flying around Matilda-style.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is one of my oldest bookmarks. It's not only that the professor shows the illusions, but he also shows his research and explains them.

<comment><USER9> The linked research only describes phenomenological characteristics of illusions, so it doesn't strike me as an explanation. But it points to research that does attempt to explain the peculiarities of what conditions these illusions arise. For example, it seems to explain the effect of the brightness of the background on these motion illusions :

 _First, an optimised stimulus can induce motion aftereffect on a stationary sinusoidal grating, which provides evidence for the activity of the visual motion mechanism. Second, perceived direction can be altered by background luminance. The local mean luminance seems crucial. On the basis of these findings, we propose that asymmetric responses of motion detectors to the jittering luminance gradient are the source of this illusion. A gradient model of motion detectors, which takes the image velocity as local temporal gradient over local spatial gradient, can predict such asymmetric responses if we assume imbalance in the positive and negative parts of temporal derivative filters. The asymmetry then depends on the DC offset of the stimulus, which explains the effect of the background luminance._

From <http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v031085>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "Autumn color swamp" doesn't "work" for me. Sometimes the background appears to move, but most of the time, everything appears still..

<comment><USER11> I believe this one works best when the page itself is moving (e.g. by scrolling).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This page is a headache waiting to happen.

<comment><USER13> Tell me about it. I think they're incredible illustrations but my head's all achey now!

<comment><USER14> If you close you eyes, can you still see them????

<comment><USER15> Thankfully not, though the forks make it hard to close all the way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anyone else seeing this interesting Chrome advertising? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/HssZZ.png

<comment><USER2> WOW!!

If Bing was offering IE9 _as_ Chrome to ppl searching for Chrome, ppl would be up in arms.

No technical glitch justifies this. I wonder how widespread it is (not happening here).

edit: clarity about the issue being offering one browser with the other's title

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm only getting this in Firefox and I'm also getting it on a bunch of other searches: download firefox, download winrar, download microsoft word, download anti virus, download free music</comment>